Priorities Must Be Reconsidered Immediately

Over the weekend I maintained hope that on Monday my words from last week's column about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his visit to New York City for a United Nations summit would be rendered void.

A part of me trusted the human nature of the staff at the hotel – the Warwick, to be specific – that would receive him to say no and the decency of the United States Government, from President Obama down to the police officers on the street, to step in and either bar the dictator from entering the country or haul him off to the jail cell he so obviously deserves. I even hoped that maybe, somehow, he would use his last visit to sit down and say nothing at the UN. None of that happened though. Instead, everything I feared came true, along with a new cacophony of outbursts and threats that the American delegation decided to sit through, breaking tradition with their past symbolism of walking out. He even made it for interviews with journalists, predictably praising the demonstrations against the “insulting” film Innocence of Muslims and joking about the bounty placed on Indian-born author and Islam critic Salman Rushdie – a bounty which Ahmadinejad's masters, the clerics, increased to 3.3 million dollars. Although Rushdie was not involved in making the film, the Iranian Government has been seeking his death for decades and saw the outrage on the streets as a good opportunity to try and finish the job.

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Even with all this, the greatest tragedy of Ahmadinejad's visit is not the spineless behavior displayed by his American hosts or even the speeches he will give throughout the week. Its the fact that he is not just some distorted, delusional madman shunned by the rest of the world. Just days earlier in Pakistan, as the streets smoldered and the body count rose after a day of “Love for the Prophet” protests over the movie, Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour came out with his own bounty (100,000 dollars out of pocket) for the assassination of the creator behind Innocence of Muslims. While the Pakistani Government distanced itself from its minster's declaration, he has yet to fired or charged with attempting to incite murder. Take all this in for just a moment...a government official of a country that is supposed to be an American ally, one that has received billions of dollars in aid, goes on record invoking the assistance of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban to permanently silence someone in the United States for using his fundamental right to free speech. For those of you who don't care about the filmmaker(s), Bilour's threat included additional payments for the killing of anyone else who commits blasphemy against Islam in the future. There are plenty of people out there willing to act on the offers made by people like Bilour and the Iranian clerics. Consider the young woman who, whether motivated by coercive brainwashing or genuine anger, got behind the wheel of a sedan full of explosives in Afghanistan's capital last week and rammed it into a bus full of South African construction workers, killing them and herself in a massive explosion that also maimed Afghans on their way to work. Her handlers deemed it “revenge” for the blasphemous film, although the victims had absolutely nothing to do with it. Facts like this though, don't seem to matter, which is why angry Muslims at a protest in Sydney, Australia – described by a friend of mine who lives there as an “outright riot” – avenged their insulted religion by destroying property in the city and waving signs that warned Australians they would be in danger of losing their heads should they mock Islam like some people in California chose to do. Much like the hope I held out for the failure of my own predictions last week, I have spent the last few days trying to convince myself that the world hasn't lost it in the way that I think it has. Maybe its just me, perhaps I'm the one who doesn't get it and could be deteriorating mentally. The latter is for you to decide, but the grand horror show of death, destruction, apologies, and political correctness that is consuming the world and leaving a growing number of bodies in its wake remains impossible to justify. As Ahmadinejad condemns the film and demands more respect for Muslim rights, Iran is taking dramatic steps to reduce the number of women attending college and has begun the process of walling its population off with a “domestic internet” that will keep out foreign interaction. While the Pakistani Government strokes its own ego for standing up against blasphemy, acts of genocide are taking place against the Shiite-Muslim minority with relative indifference on the part of the police and the rest of the general population. Target killings and bombings rage on in major cities as a young Christian girl named Rimsha Masih is on trial for desecrating the Koran, even though most of the evidence points to an imam who sought to frame her as the real culprit. There is plenty to go on with to unmask this revolting hypocrisy, like the wholesale slaughter of the Syrian people by the regime of Bashar Al-Assad, an atrocity where activists surviving on the ground must be devastated at the sight of the Arab and Muslim world uniting together over a stupid film while Syrians lie dead and buried under rubble from air and artillery strikes. A recent wave of assaults that killed about 100 people in Iraq earlier this month was met with similar silence, even in the country where the attacks took place – although thousands of Iraqis found time to rally and make threats over the film. No matter how high the death toll climbs, the Muslim world has shown limited interest in purging out its most shameful players when they hide behind the faith, even though most of the victims share it too. Despite all of this chaos, it is not the Muslim protesters that deserve all of the criticism. The United States Government has made condemning Innocence of Muslims a greater priority than defending the right to free speech, a cornerstone of American society that must be protected at all costs. Mild reference to it has come up, but only when intertwined with extensive denunciations of how cruel and misguided the film is. These denunciations, which the Obama Administration aired on Pakistani television to the tune of $70,000, have ironically given this low-budget production from the gutter of the internet additional attention on the worldwide stage that it never would have received. Americans from all backgrounds and political views should be rallying together to rebuke violent murderers when they demand changes to our laws – and we deserve leadership that will do the same. Over the years, the United States may not always have the biggest economy or the strongest military, and as the last couple of weeks have shown us, it definitely does not have the most honest politicians. Free speech though, is an American trait that will be everlasting so long as we are willing to stand up for it.